drey72's review
4.0
What do you do when you find out that your best friend is in prison? If you're Michael St. Pierre, you pack your bags and stage a rescue. And when you find out your girlfriend of one month is in the next cell? Why, you rescue her too, of course. And once everyone's safely away from the resulting manhunt, you try to figure out why. Along with wondering who, exactly, you've been dating. Not exactly easy to do when you're running from all manners of bad guys who're right on your heels...
Character: Michael is a bad-guy-gone-good, a complex person who's surprisingly easy to like in this offering from Richard Doetsch. He's had experiences, I guess you could say, but he's trying to stay on the straight and narrow now, with deviations from that path only for a good cause. And that's "good cause" according to his conscience! KC seemed a bit more superficial to me, she's the perfect girlfriend with a past, who's attempting to deal with the boyfriend and sister finding out her truth, while trying to save her sister from kidnappers. The chemistry between KC and Michael is there, but I would quite call it palpable. Rounding out the group are Father Simon Bellatori, the man-of-the-cloth BFF who needed rescuing, and Paul Busch, Michael's former parole officer turned accomplice-in-complicated-rescues.
Pace & Plot: The Thieves of Darkness reads so fast and furious, I could see the action scenes in my head, complete with car chases and things blowing up spectacularly. There are no gaping holes in the plot, and no confusing, over-complicated storylines. And no beating you over the head repeatedly with "see, this is how this relates to that", just in case you missed it or couldn't figure it out (which was one of my peeves with Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons... This doesn't mean there aren't surprises, so don't go thinking this is boring.
A must-read for fans of the mystery/thriller with a historical background.
Character: Michael is a bad-guy-gone-good, a complex person who's surprisingly easy to like in this offering from Richard Doetsch. He's had experiences, I guess you could say, but he's trying to stay on the straight and narrow now, with deviations from that path only for a good cause. And that's "good cause" according to his conscience! KC seemed a bit more superficial to me, she's the perfect girlfriend with a past, who's attempting to deal with the boyfriend and sister finding out her truth, while trying to save her sister from kidnappers. The chemistry between KC and Michael is there, but I would quite call it palpable. Rounding out the group are Father Simon Bellatori, the man-of-the-cloth BFF who needed rescuing, and Paul Busch, Michael's former parole officer turned accomplice-in-complicated-rescues.
Pace & Plot: The Thieves of Darkness reads so fast and furious, I could see the action scenes in my head, complete with car chases and things blowing up spectacularly. There are no gaping holes in the plot, and no confusing, over-complicated storylines. And no beating you over the head repeatedly with "see, this is how this relates to that", just in case you missed it or couldn't figure it out (which was one of my peeves with Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons... This doesn't mean there aren't surprises, so don't go thinking this is boring.
A must-read for fans of the mystery/thriller with a historical background.
tanyarobinson's review
3.0
This adventure was just a little too over the top for me. The descriptions that went "beyond anything he could ever imagine" drove me crazy. Obviously not a favorite.
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